Daron PachecoCEO, Howdy Media · Brand Builder

How do you turn your customers into family?

1 Jun 2026 · 1 min

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1:15

In this monologue, the speaker reflects on the origins of his community‑focused philosophy for his restaurant business. He identifies essential community pillars—teachers, firefighters, police, and healthcare workers—and describes how he devised a plan to support them by reaching out, forming partnerships, and serving on multiple nonprofit boards. He emphasizes that these community members are the backbone of his restaurant’s success because they become patrons. The speaker stresses that guests are not merely revenue sources but are treated as family, and that nurturing these relationships, alongside giving back to the community, is central to the business’s thriving ecosystem.

Chapters

And that's really where everything began, um, was me evaluating what can we do for the community. And I started thinking about our community. What is our community? What makes our community thrive? Well, we need teachers, we need our firefighters, we need our police, policemen, we need our healthcare workers. And so I was like, those are the things that I wanted to focus on. So several years ago, I had come up with a plan of how can I do this? Like, I want to support the things that support us in the community. And so I started coming up with plans to reach those organizations, partner with those organizations, joined a bunch of boards. At one time I was on 5 different boards, which was way too many. I don't encourage being on that many boards, but, uh, just getting involved with the people that help us thrive was initially what I wanted to do. Supporting those who support us, those people come into our restaurants, they eat. Without our guests We are nothing. We don't have anything. We depend on our guests. We love our guests. I don't— we don't view our guests just as a check number. We don't view our guests just as a tab that's paid. We view them as part of our family. Without you, we wouldn't have what we have. And so finding those things inside our community, to me, was very important.